


Not Fade Away

by whelvenwings



Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-07
Updated: 2015-04-07
Packaged: 2018-03-21 19:08:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,256
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3702669
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whelvenwings/pseuds/whelvenwings
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Cas doesn't want to be called 'buddy' anymore.<br/>--<br/>“I hate it when you call me that,” Cas said, after two hours of silence.</p><p>He sensed rather than saw Dean glance over at him from the driver’s seat, his own face turned away to stare out of the window. There was nothing to look at but the night, with his own dim reflection superimposed over the darkness; his features were blurred and flattened by the distortion. His eyes were twin black circles, and his mouth was scissor-blade thin, lips pressed tight together. He’d snipped the sentence out of the silence like a young surgeon making the first incision: quickly, to hide his nervousness.</p><p>Dean cleared his throat, and Cas clenched his fists a little tighter.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Not Fade Away

“I hate it when you call me that,” Cas said, after two hours of silence.

He sensed rather than saw Dean glance over at him from the driver’s seat, his own face turned away to stare out of the window. There was nothing to look at but the night, with his own dim reflection superimposed over the darkness; his features were blurred and flattened by the distortion. His eyes were twin black circles, and his mouth was scissor-blade thin, lips pressed tight together. He’d snipped the sentence out of the silence like a young surgeon making the first incision: quickly, to hide his nervousness.

Dean cleared his throat, and Cas clenched his fists a little tighter.

“Hate it when I call you… what?” Dean asked. His tone was trying for light-hearted, but there was an undercurrent of gruff cautiousness that belied him: he’d caught the tail ends of Cas’ mood, and was grasping for a better hold. Cas paused for a moment before replying, trying to still the rapid thump-thump of his heart. He was used to its steady pulse, now, of course, in his throat and in his wrist and in his chest; but when it sped up, when it pounded on his ribcage like this, it almost took his breath away. The quick  _thud thud_ reminded him of wingbeats.

“Hmm?” Dean prompted, and Cas turned his head, so that Dean could see his profile. His lips were still drawn hairpin-thin.

“Buddy,” he said, at last.

“Buddy?” Dean repeated, after a moment. Cas had taken him by surprise; Dean shifted slightly in his seat, cleared his throat. “What’s wrong with calling you that?”

Cas’ gaze dropped down to his knees for a second. Dean was watching the road again, but Cas could feel the awareness between them, the mutual focus on each other’s breathing, each other’s body. Cas rubbed his thumb once over the knuckle of his index finger, and saw Dean’s hands clench slightly on the steering wheel in response. He swallowed; this was intimacy without touching, closeness with distance between. He was hot in his coat, though the night was cold.

“It’s not an accurate name for you to call me,” Cas said.

“Not accurate?” Dean demanded, quickly. Cas allowed himself a glance and saw that Dean’s cheeks were pink. The heated silences weren’t lost on him, then. Cas felt his pulse kick up, wingbeats pounding harder.

“That’s what I said,” he replied. Dean was silent for a moment, considering the wall that had been thrown up in their conversation.

“OK,” he said, finally. “What are you saying, then, you don’t think we’re friends?”

Cas pretended to think about this, as though he had not spent the past two hours assessing and preparing for any direction this conversation might take. He cleared his throat slightly, and saw Dean angle his head towards him, in his peripheral vision.

“Yes, we’re friends,” he stated. “But I do not think that buddy is an appropriate name for you to call me. Do you know the etymological root of the word ‘buddy’?”

Cas could sense Dean’s eye-roll in the way his hand waved off the steering wheel, palm flat in ironic invitation.

“Please,” he said dryly, “enlighten me.”

“There are some people who think it originates from old English mining terms,” Cas said. “But most American dictionaries will list it as a derivation of the word ‘brother’.”

There was another pause, taut and crackling with static like a balloon ready to burst.

“So?” Dean said, his voice creaking slightly over that one word. His right index finger was drumming nervously in time with the  _hum, hum, hum_ of the car’s engine turning over.

Cas’s fists were clenched so tightly that he could feel the crescent dents that his fingernails were making in his palms. He opened them and looked down at the red marks, livid on his skin like four different views of the same moon.

“I don’t think we’re the ‘brother’ kind of friend,” he said, pushing one last breath into the balloon. There was a moment of stillness, and then –

“What?” Dean said, loudly, bursting the tension with a snap of anger. “What does that even mean, Cas?”

“There are different forms of friendship,” Cas said, trying to speak calmly. “There are different ways to care about a person. I do not think that you and I fall under the category of brotherhood.”

“After all we’ve been through?” Dean demanded, his voice rising. The car was speeding up slightly, her roar a little louder. “After everything we’ve done, you’re going to try to tell me we’re not family? What the hell, Cas, where is this even coming from?”

“I do not mean that our bond is in any way superficial!” Cas said. He was losing composure, matching Dean’s shift in mood. “I wasn’t suggesting that we aren’t close – very close –”

He ran out of words too quickly, and felt the heat rising in his face; they’d gone off-script, and he was unprepared.

“Well, then –” Dean began, but Cas cut across him.

“I just don’t like the name ‘buddy’,” he said. “That’s all.”

“Well, what would you rather I called you?” Dean demanded.

There was a pause. In the silence between her passengers, the Impala growled and rattled. After a few seconds, Dean sighed heavily: a comma in the conversation that offered to be a full stop. Cas could drop this now, if he wanted. And yet –

 _Call me something different,_ he begged silently.  _Call me asshole. Call me darling. Call me honey, call me bastard, call me beloved. Call me without words. Call me with a smile. Call me with your eyes on me. Call me with your hand wanting mine. Call me always, with your attention half on me, even when we don’t speak, even when you can’t see me. Call me angel, which I was. Call me fallen, which I am. Call me anything, let me be anything, anything but your buddy. Don’t call me your buddy. Call me something different._

“Anything you want,” he said, out loud, the words tripping a little as he spoke them. “Just – not –”

Dean glanced over at him, his eyes wide. Unable to help himself, tugged by the magnet-strength between them, Cas looked over to meet his gaze.

“This means a lot to you,” Dean said, his eyes searching Cas’ face for a moment before he looked back at the road, and Cas breathed again.

Cas hesitated, weighing each word carefully before speaking.

“There was a time,” he said, “when all I wanted was to be  _somebody_ to you. Your ally, your friend… it wasn’t important. But now – I am more aware of – the nature of my…”

He broke off, gritting his teeth. The words were choking in his throat, too heavy, too ponderous, too difficult to speak. He shuddered a breath in, hoping that Dean couldn’t hear the labour in his lungs.

“Spit it out, would you?” Dean said, a little too loudly, and Cas was snapping his head around to glare at him before he’d even decided how to react.

“It’s not as easy as that,” he replied. “You know it’s not –”

“I don’t know anything. I don’t understand anything _._  All of this is over my head.”

“Don’t pretend you don’t understand. You know  _perfectly_ well why I can’t…”

“Why you can’t  _what_ , Cas?!”

“Why I can’t be a brother to you! A buddy! I can’t – I can’t do that, Dean!”

“Why not?!”

Cas flung his full weight onto his brakes, barely managing to call a halt on his runaway mouth before he blurted out something terrible. Dean, meanwhile, was throwing on his own brakes, drawing the car over to the side of the road and slowing her down fast enough to lean Cas’ body forwards, the seatbelt locking to keep him in place.

“Why  _not_ , Cas?!” Dean repeated, when the Impala was completely still, the engine still running. Cas opened his mouth, looking into Dean’s hard, wanting eyes; the engine noise was a growl around him, the huff of their fast breathing filling the closer space, the pound of his heart a frantic beating of wings in his chest. Everything was so close, so messy, so uncontrollable. He snapped his lips closed and tilted his head down, shaking his head and closing his eyes tightly.

“I can’t – I–” he broke off, each inhale a burn in the back of his throat.

After a moment, Dean turned off the engine.

In the silence, they sat next to each other, not quite together. Cas’ mind was static-buzzed and out of balance; everything was out of balance. He didn’t look at Dean, didn’t even open his eyes. He should have known that he wouldn’t be able to control the situation, wouldn’t be able to dictate the course of the conversation. Hadn’t he been shown often enough that his best-laid plans never went the way he expected? Would he never learn?

Oh, but it had been just one push too far, today, when they’d been walking back to the car together and Dean had said casually,  _put my coat on the back seat, would you, buddy?_ The word had stuck in his mind like a wasp in a kitchen, out of place, irritating… and representative of all the things, all the tiny little things that Dean forced out to make them  _just friends, obviously, just good friends, family, brothers-in-arms._ Just friends. Just buddies. It had been building and building and today, Cas had been unable to take it any longer.

Here, in the dark, they slowly began to even out. Cas’ breathing eased; Dean’s death-grip on the steering wheel loosened.

When the silence was soft enough between them, Cas folded his hands neatly and stared down at them, before speaking.

“I – can’t be your buddy, Dean,” he said. Dean swallowed, loud in the silence. Cas could imagine the way that his throat had moved, the way he was twisting his mouth to one side before he spoke.

“Why not?” he asked. The question was quiet, this time.

“Dean…” Cas said, looking over at him. Surely he understood, now? But Dean’s eyes were narrowed and expectant, allowing no escape.

“Please,” Dean said, after a moment. His tone was a little gruff, his lips pressed closed as though to stop anything else slipping out. The single word took Cas by surprise, brought words to his mouth that he didn’t think he could possibly speak – and yet –

“I am not your buddy,” he ground out, “because that is not how I feel for you. That is – that is not – that is not how I love you.”

Cas had spoken the words to the darkness on the other side of the windshield, half to the man beside him and half offering them up to the sky like a prayer, a desperate wish. After a moment, he summoned his courage, and looked to his left.

Dean’s face was – was –

Cas thought that perhaps he had never seen anything as beautiful, as absolutely stunningly beautiful, as Dean Winchester in that moment. Ordinarily, Dean took Cas’ breath away, but this was not Ordinary Dean. This was Dean sublimed, Dean divine, Dean both dazzled and radiant; this was Dean, who knew that Castiel was in love with him.

“You –” Dean said, his expression melting and reforming, shock and  _disbelief_ and shock and  _hope_ and shock and  _joy_ and shock and _…_

“Yes,” Cas said, the word coming out as a whisper, his voice almost silenced by wonder and relief and a painful, spearhead anticipation.

Dean’s sudden smile was irrepressible, bashful, nervous; he leaned forward and then pulled back quickly, half-reached out a hand and then tucked it between his knees. His cheeks were bright red, his mouth working to lie flat.

“Well, uh,” he said. “W-well.”

“This doesn’t have to change anything between us,” Cas said, a little too quickly. He glanced down, then back up to Dean’s face. “Not if you don’t want it to. We can just be –”

“Cas,” Dean interrupted. He stared into Cas’ eyes, biting his lip and then letting it go. “Cas…”

 _At least it’s not ‘buddy’,_ Cas found himself thinking. The space between them felt painful to him, aching in his bones and his muscles and his cold, untouched skin, as though he were finally feeling the full weight of his feelings: the absolute power of the terrible and awesome gravity that pulled them together. He fought it, he fought it, he fought it. He waited for Dean’s answer. But Dean was drowning; he was wordless, he was unsure and disbelieving.

“We don’t have to…” Cas tried to say again, his voice a croak. “We don’t – we don’t have to…”

“Cas,” Dean said roughly, and then he tilted his chin up; he lifted his hands, fingers soft and supplicant; he leaned forward, just an inch, barely even that. And yet, it was enough, it was  _enough;_ with every fibre of his body, with each tiny gesture, he called to Cas. He called without words, in the language that only they understood. He  _called_  to Cas, and with a flurry and rush from his wingbeat heart, Cas fell into his arms.

“This is how I love you,” Cas murmured, pressing the words against Dean’s lips. “This is how I’ve always loved you.”

Dean didn’t smile, barely breathed. Their kiss was soft, sweet – ordinary, and  _perfect_ , resounding through Cas’ body like a clear note struck on a bell that chimed, calling in a future that was golden, that was brilliant – that was forever.


End file.
